Compromise strategies for action selection

Abstract

Among the many properties suggested for action-selection mechanisms, a prominent one is the ability to select compromise actions, i.e. actions that are not the best to satisfy any active goal in isolation, but rather compromise between multiple goals. This paper briefly reviews the history of compromise behaviour and presents experimental analyses of it in an attempt to determine how much compromise behaviour aids an agent. It concludes that optimal compromise behaviour has a surprisingly small benefit over non-compromise behaviour in the experiments performed, and presents some reasons why this may be true and hypothesizes cases where compromise behaviour is truly useful. In particular, it hypothesizes that a crucial factor is the level at which an action is taken (low-level actions are specific, such as ‘move left leg’; high-level actions are vague, such as ‘forage for food’). This paper hypothesizes that compromise behaviour is more beneficial for high- than low-level actions.